Cloudflare released access to their DNS service on the 1st of April 2018. I’ve been using it on my router since it was released. I’ve decided to run some basic tests on the DNS popular services available to the general public.

DNS services I’ll be testing:

OpenDNS

Quad9

Cloudflare

Google

Norton

Sky (UK ISP)

Level3

Dyn

Comodo Secure DNS

For the testing I’ll be using Namebench, you can download it here: https://github.com/google/namebench

Results

I was quite surprised by the results, especially since Cloudflare have been somewhat bragging that they are the fastest available DNS. Cloudflare came 4th in my testing, being easily beaten by Google, level3 and Norton DNS. Comodos DNS did extremely poorly coming in at an avg of 206.36ms. I’ll rerun the test in the next few days and if Cloudflare is still lagging behind I will switch DNS provider.